Skunk Works

The contract was like a health care insurance policy without catastrophic coverage: you were fine as long as you were fine. If something terrible happened, you would go down the tubes dead broke. If it proved impossible for us to duplicate the incredible invisibility of a wooden model with a full-size flying machine, we would be penalized and expected to foot the entire bill to get it right. I was feeling particularly skittish on that score because a few weeks before the contract negotiations began, I received an urgent call from Keith Beswick, head of our flight test operation out at the secret base.

“Ben,” he exclaimed, “we’ve lost our stealth.” He explained that Ken Dyson had flown that morning in Have Blue against the radar range and was lit like a goddam Christmas tree. “They saw him coming from fifty miles.”

Actually, Keith and I both figured out what the problem was. Those stealth airplanes demanded absolutely smooth surfaces to remain invisible. That meant intensive preflight preparations in which special radar-absorbent materials were filled in around all the access panels and doors. This material came in sheets like linoleum and had to be perfectly cut to fit. About an hour after the first phone call, Keith phoned again. Problem solved. The heads of three screws were not quite tight and extended above the surface by less than an eighth of an inch. On radar they appeared as big as a barn door!

So the lesson was clear: building stealth would require a level of care and perfection unprecedented in aerospace. The pressure would really be on us to get it right the first time or literally pay a terrible price for our mistakes. Deep down, I felt confident that the Skunk Works would rise to the challenge. We always had in the past. Still, I had to swallow hard taking my case to our corporate leaders, who were still struggling to put our company back on its feet. They reacted with about as much apprehension as Kelly Johnson had when I told him about the contract: “Oh, boy. You could wind up losing your ass.”

I argued that management had expected me to hustle and get new business, which also meant taking risks. Our new CEO, Roy Anderson, and president Larry Kitchen were clearly worried about our ability to duplicate the low radar cross section we had achieved on a small wooden model. “That is just asking for big league trouble promising to equal that,” Kitchen remarked. I couldn’t deny that he was right. I said, “We’ve already shown that we know what we are doing when it comes to stealth. We’ve been as good as our predictions up to now. And there’s no reason to think we’ll drop the ball. We’ll build up a quick learning curve delivering these first five airplanes, and if we do hit a snag, we’ll make it up off the back end. The fifteen to come will provide our profit margin.”

One or two executives wanted me to refuse the deal and wait for the end of the Have Blue tests in the next year or so, when the Air Force would not be so intent on covering their own butts because they were buying untested merchandise. I rejected that idea. “Right now, we’ve got a contract and also the inside track on the next step, which is where the big payoff awaits: building them their stealth bomber. That’s why this risk is worth taking. They’ll want at least one hundred bombers, and we’ll be looking at tens of billions in business. So what’s this risk compared to what we can gain later on? Peanuts.”

It was not a very happy meeting, and the conclusion reached was reluctant and not unanimous. The corporate bean counters insisted we install a fail-safe monitoring and review procedure that would sound the alarm the moment we fell behind or hit any snags. “Above all, no nasty surprises, Ben,” Larry Kitchen warned me. Frankly, he sounded more prayerful than hopeful.

From that moment on, a hard knot formed in my gut around my biggest worry: guaranteeing bombing accuracy. Who knew what huge, ugly, time-consuming problems lay in store for us solving that one? Unlike the low-flying B-1 bomber that attacked from the deck, we would come in relatively high—twenty thousand feet or more—giving us a tighter circle to aim at. Also, because we would be invisible, our pilots would not have to duck and weave to avoid missiles or flak. We would have a clear shot to drop a pair of two-thousand-pounders. Hopefully, laser-guided smart bombs sighted by the pilot in the cockpit would prove unerring. Otherwise, I was in the tank until we found out how to make those damned bombs wise up.

The Air Force pressured me to accept a deadline of twenty-two months to test-fly the first fighter. It had taken us eighteen months to build Have Blue, which was far simpler, but I reluctantly agreed to meet the deadline. As Alan Brown, my program manager for the fighter production, put it, “Ben said ‘Okay.’ The rest of us said, ‘Oh, shit.’ ”

The contract was signed on November 1, 1978. We had only until July 1980 to build the first airplane, get it right, and get it flying.